The Patrick Melrose Novels: Never Mind, Bad News, Some Hope, and Mother's Milk by Edward St. Aubyn Page B
Authors: Edward St. Aubyn
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in the mind it’s who you are: it was silly, it was unhelpful, but it whined about him like a mosquito in the dark.
Just as a novelist may sometimes wonder why he invents characters who do not exist and makes them do things which do not matter, so a philosopher may wonder why he invents cases that cannot occur in order to determine what must be the case. After a long neglect of his subject, Victor was not as thoroughly convinced that impossibility was the best route to necessity as he might have been had he recently reconsidered Stolkin’s extreme case in which ‘scientists destroy my brain and body, and then make out of new matter, a replica of Greta Garbo’. How could one help agreeing with Stolkin that ‘there would be no connection between me and the resulting person’?
Nevertheless, to think one knew what would happen to a person’s sense of identity if his brain was cut in half and distributed between identical twins seemed, just for now, before he had thrown himself back into the torrent of philosophical debate, a poor substitute for an intelligent description of what it is to know who you are.
Victor went indoors to fetch the familiar tube of Bisodol indigestion tablets. As usual he had eaten his sandwich too fast, pushing it down his throat like a sword-swallower. He thought with renewed appreciation of William James’s remark that the self consists mainly of ‘peculiar motions in the head and between the head and throat’, although the peculiar motions somewhat lower down in his stomach and bowels felt at least as personal.
When Victor sat down again he pictured himself thinking, and tried to superimpose this picture on his inner vacancy. If he was essentially a thinking machine, then he needed to be serviced. It was not the problems of philosophy but the problem with philosophy that preoccupied him that afternoon. And yet how often the two became indistinguishable. Wittgenstein had said that the philosopher’s treatment of a question was like the treatment of a disease. But which treatment? Purging? Leeches? Antibiotics against the infections of language? Indigestion tablets, thought Victor, belching softly, to help break down the doughy bulk of sensation?
We ascribe thoughts to thinkers because this is the way we speak, but persons need not be claimed to be the thinkers of these thoughts. Still, thought Victor lazily, why not bow down to popular demand on this occasion? As to brains and minds, was there really any problem about two categorically different phenomena, brain process and consciousness, occurring simultaneously? Or was the problem with the categories?
From down the hill Victor heard a car door slam. It must be Eleanor dropping Anne at the bottom of the drive. Victor flicked open his watch, checked the time, and snapped it closed again. What had he achieved? Almost nothing. It was not one of those unproductive days when he was confused by abundance and starved, like Buridan’s ass, between two equally nourishing bales of hay. His lack of progress today was more profound.
He watched Anne rounding the last corner of the drive, painfully bright in her white dress.
‘Hi,’ she said.
‘Hello,’ said Victor with boyish gloom.
‘How’s it going?’
‘Oh, it’s been fairly futile exercise, but I suppose it’s good to get any exercise at all.’
‘Don’t knock that futile exercise,’ said Anne, ‘it’s big business. Bicycles that don’t go anyplace, a long walk to nowhere on a rubber treadmill, heavy things you don’t even need to pick up.’
Victor remained silent, staring down at his one sentence. Anne rested her hands on his shoulders. ‘So there’s no major news on who we are?’
‘Afraid not. Personal identity, of course, is a fiction, a pure fiction. But I’ve reached this conclusion by the wrong method.’
‘What was that?’
‘Not thinking about it.’
‘But that’s what the English mean, isn’t it, when they say, “He was very
Just as a novelist may sometimes wonder why he invents characters who do not exist and makes them do things which do not matter, so a philosopher may wonder why he invents cases that cannot occur in order to determine what must be the case. After a long neglect of his subject, Victor was not as thoroughly convinced that impossibility was the best route to necessity as he might have been had he recently reconsidered Stolkin’s extreme case in which ‘scientists destroy my brain and body, and then make out of new matter, a replica of Greta Garbo’. How could one help agreeing with Stolkin that ‘there would be no connection between me and the resulting person’?
Nevertheless, to think one knew what would happen to a person’s sense of identity if his brain was cut in half and distributed between identical twins seemed, just for now, before he had thrown himself back into the torrent of philosophical debate, a poor substitute for an intelligent description of what it is to know who you are.
Victor went indoors to fetch the familiar tube of Bisodol indigestion tablets. As usual he had eaten his sandwich too fast, pushing it down his throat like a sword-swallower. He thought with renewed appreciation of William James’s remark that the self consists mainly of ‘peculiar motions in the head and between the head and throat’, although the peculiar motions somewhat lower down in his stomach and bowels felt at least as personal.
When Victor sat down again he pictured himself thinking, and tried to superimpose this picture on his inner vacancy. If he was essentially a thinking machine, then he needed to be serviced. It was not the problems of philosophy but the problem with philosophy that preoccupied him that afternoon. And yet how often the two became indistinguishable. Wittgenstein had said that the philosopher’s treatment of a question was like the treatment of a disease. But which treatment? Purging? Leeches? Antibiotics against the infections of language? Indigestion tablets, thought Victor, belching softly, to help break down the doughy bulk of sensation?
We ascribe thoughts to thinkers because this is the way we speak, but persons need not be claimed to be the thinkers of these thoughts. Still, thought Victor lazily, why not bow down to popular demand on this occasion? As to brains and minds, was there really any problem about two categorically different phenomena, brain process and consciousness, occurring simultaneously? Or was the problem with the categories?
From down the hill Victor heard a car door slam. It must be Eleanor dropping Anne at the bottom of the drive. Victor flicked open his watch, checked the time, and snapped it closed again. What had he achieved? Almost nothing. It was not one of those unproductive days when he was confused by abundance and starved, like Buridan’s ass, between two equally nourishing bales of hay. His lack of progress today was more profound.
He watched Anne rounding the last corner of the drive, painfully bright in her white dress.
‘Hi,’ she said.
‘Hello,’ said Victor with boyish gloom.
‘How’s it going?’
‘Oh, it’s been fairly futile exercise, but I suppose it’s good to get any exercise at all.’
‘Don’t knock that futile exercise,’ said Anne, ‘it’s big business. Bicycles that don’t go anyplace, a long walk to nowhere on a rubber treadmill, heavy things you don’t even need to pick up.’
Victor remained silent, staring down at his one sentence. Anne rested her hands on his shoulders. ‘So there’s no major news on who we are?’
‘Afraid not. Personal identity, of course, is a fiction, a pure fiction. But I’ve reached this conclusion by the wrong method.’
‘What was that?’
‘Not thinking about it.’
‘But that’s what the English mean, isn’t it, when they say, “He was very
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